Help us help you!
By borg. Friday, 19. January 2007, 16:10:04
Attention: This build is experimental.

It contains a feature reporting system that will report back usage of a number of features to Opera once per week. This allows us to know more about how you all use our product in an anonymous way.

The idea is that while some people tell us about their wishes and concerns in the blog and forums, thousands of people download the weeklies without giving direct feedback. By using a build with feature reporting, they will also contribute to improving the product for all of us.

Yes, you can turn the feature off:
opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableUsageReport

Normally we don't ask you to install a weekly on top of a final version, but if you dare do so this time it will help us get more correct data, making sure that we continue to make a better browser for YOU.


So, what does the report contain?

You can check yourself, a copy of the next report is stored in the Opera profile directory, under usagereport/report.xml. It reports things like what preferences you have enabled or not, whether you use Widgets or not, and how many bookmarks you have. Only numbers*, no domain names or other sensitive data.

*) Excluding Visa and MasterCard

my opera

Friday, 19. January 2007, 14:37:24

about, linux, opera, desktop

In this week's weekly we enabled a new experimental feature - usage report.


Usage… of what?
Well, of your browser setup, of your preferences, of the features you use, or don't use in Opera - in short, of how you really use Opera. You often told us how you would like Opera to be, or behave, which features you would like to add, etc. But we don't know how you actually use Opera. This report is done in a completely anonymous way, no personal or sensitive details are sent to us. And yes, for the paranoid, there is a way of disabling the feature:

opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableUsageReport

We usually do not recommend to install weeklies over final installations - but in this case we might make an exception. So, for the daredevils:

take a backup of your profile.
make sure you have a backup of your profile (twice should be enough, right?)
install this week's weekly build as your main build.


In this way we could really see how you really use your Opera - and not the test build you customize to death.

Now… what does this really look like?
You can easily inspect the details of the report in ~/.opera/usagereport/report.xml. Let me give you an example of what this might look like. Take my own report (I'll upload it as a .txt file for easier reading). There are a few things that might be interesting for us:

I use Opera for mail (and have 99094 messages)
I use Opera for feeds (and am subscribed to 91 of them)
I visited 1301 pages last week (is that a small number?)
I use several windows (4)
I use a lot of tabs! (average is 343, with a peak at 377)
I allow 20 max connections to server and 128 in total (I need that for all those tabs)
Almost everything in QuickPrefs is disabled
I have my own key bindings
I don't use BitTorrent nor Widgets (who does?…)

And how does your Opera look like? What do you use, or tweak, or configure? Mine looks pretty plain - but don't let yourself be fooled: there are 343 tabs, it's just that… I disable the tab bar…

Build 8701/3607/543 Released | Opera 9.12

Changelog
Included experimental feature reporting mechanism
Java works again
Some stability fixes

Included experimental feature reporting mechanism
Java works again
Some stability fixes
URL entered in detached tab now actually opens it in the detached tab
Quick find in windows panel now searches in windows panel if both are open
Visited links "Expiry" settings now work properly

New weekly build
By olli. Friday, 2. February 2007, 17:11:27
Hi
We added experimental developer tool to Opera. Go to tools/advanced/Developer Console to try it out. (will not work with js and popups disabled)
Sorry no static linux build today :-(

"Is that my blog on your Speed Dial?"
By borg. Wednesday, 28. February 2007, 16:43:57desktop, WEEKLY, opera mini, speed dial
Opera Mini already adds Speed Dial shortcuts to the first 9 links on the start page, so you can just press *1 to get to your favorite site on your phone. Now we do the same thing for desktop, where Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 gives you direct access to your 9 favorites. When you open a new tab, the 9 Speed Dial sites will be displayed with pretty thumbnails, a single mouse click away

Why Speed Dial?

Bookmarks often fall into two categories:
A bunch of sites you bookmark because you may want to visit them again someday
5 or 6 sites you visit very often

Speed Dial is an elegant way to address the second category. When you open a new tab, it will often be to go to one of your favorite sites, so why not just show them there instead of an entirely blank page? Adding your favorites to Speed Dial is also very, very simple: Just click the button and choose a site from your Top 10 history or from the currently open tabs. Deleting them is just as simple, with the X in the upper right corner.

Cool stuff:
You can reload all thumbnails by pressing Ctrl+R, giving you a quick overview of whether your favorite pages have changed, or just reload one of them from the right-click menu (nice for Web mail!).
We're partnering with Yahoo! on both Mobile and Desktop, which explains the new search field. You can of course configure it from search preferences.
You can drag links to thumbnails and even rearrange thumbnails by dragging them on top of each other.
You can hide the entire thing with the "Hide Speed Dial" button in the lower right corner if you don't like it.

So, what's on *your* Speed Dial?

Known issues:
Overrides your search.ini file instead of merging them: Make a backup before installing.
Thumbnails should not reload on every startup.
"Reload every..." is missing from the context menu.
Middle-click doesn't open pages in the background.
Back button doesn't go back to Speed Dial.
Several skin and display problems.
Contains some hardcoded not translatable strings.
The "What is Speed Dial" link doesn't go anywhere.
Forgetting to put your partner's blog in SD1 can have dramatic consequences


Changelog:
Fixed several crashes when printing, sending mail, removing active web panel...
Lots of minor fixes.
Start bar is replaced by Speed Dial, Top-10 and Bookmark buttons can be found in the Appearance dialog and added to other toolbars.
Canvas: Stopped drawing lines from origin (0, 0) when using path functions in accordance with changes in WHATWG canvas spec. Note to Widget developers: This may cause problems with your Widgets if you use Canvas.


Note: If you'd like to chat about weekly builds, join us in #weekly on irc.opera.com.

...that Darken is responsible

Quick update on CSS3 selectors
Tuesday, 27. February 2007, 00:09:51
Opera, selectors, css3

I previously reported that all CSS3 selectors were implemented in an internal build of Opera, but seven of these were disabled in the builds due to various issues. While this is still the case with the very latest builds, there has been progress with the two selectors that were labelled as buggy on the CSS3 selectors test. The previous results were as follows:

From the 43 selectors 34 have passed, 2 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 460 out of 578 tests)

The latest results are now as follows:

From the 43 selectors 36 have passed, 0 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 464 out of 578 tests)

I'm fairly confident that when the seven unsupported selectors are turned on we will pass all of the tests. Now to concentrate on other bugs and features…

Are there any 9.2 builds available on the Mac platform? I can't find any.

Yes...

> Mac build 3630 [Opera 9.2]
> Mac build 3620 [Opera 9.2]

Speed Dial closer to completion
By julienp. Friday, 16. March 2007, 16:18:11
There has been a lot of work done on Speed dial during the last couple of weeks. We are now getting very close to completion.

Look out for the potential regressions or new bugs. Enjoy!

Imagine title here
By olli. Thursday, 22. March 2007, 17:24:55WEEKLY, Opera

Hi all. Good to be back from vacation and being able to offer you guys a new weekly build. (No static UNIX builds for now, sorry).

Opera crashes when right clicking mouse to paste text in the mail/ signature field.

Opera crash when i try to paste in speed dial address...?!?

When I goto manage a feed, right clicking on the feeds address crashes this build for me (on Vista Ultimate)

Opera crash when writing a letter in M2 and using right mouse button.

A short changelog
By borg. Friday, 23. March 2007, 11:34:12 WEEKLY
Just thought we should bring you the latest and greatest before the weekend, so here's an update with a few small, but hopefully significant fixes.

Keiki from our Tokyo office asked me a few questions for his Japanese blog last time he was in Oslo, so if you speak the language you may want to have a look

9.2 Beta
By borg. Wednesday, 28. March 2007, 07:47:04

Thank you!

Great feedback here over the last few weeks has helped us a lot and we're happy to see 9.2 Beta going live on labs.opera.com

In other good news, Adobe has announced Creative Suite 3 where Opera is used by several components as a rendering engine.

Approaching 9.2
By feldgendler. Friday, 30. March 2007, 15:24:54
Привет всем нашим пользователям! Сегодня моя очередь объявлять еженедельный выпуск, поэтому я напишу по-русски. Спасибо пользователям из России за поддержку! Теперь у вас есть свой человек в Desktop Team. :-)

Самое важное в новом выпуске — исправления, касающиеся Flash 9 под Linux. Теперь видео с YouTube можно смотреть в полноэкранном режиме! (Ещё можно закрывать надоедливую Flash-рекламу.)

Другие изменения
Добавлен автоматический поиск из адресной строки при вводе более одного слова;
Оформление Speed Dial оптимизировано по скорости;
В запросах BitTorrent появилась поддержка необязательного «ключа», это означает, что больше торрентов будут работать;
Исправлены проблемы с прозрачными областями в некоторых виджетах под UNIX;
Появились пакеты .6 для архитектуры ppc-linux, которые будут (ну, должны) работать на PS3, если вы поставили туда Linux!


Now in English...

Hello to all our users! Today it's my turn to announce the weekly build, so why don't I post in Russian? Thanks to the Russian users for your support. Now you have an insider in Desktop Team! :-)

The most important is that we've fixed some issues with Flash 9 on Linux. This means that you can now watch YouTube video fullscreen! (And close annyoing Flash ads.)

Easter egg!
By borg. Tuesday, 3. April 2007, 14:46:02
After a boring weekend we're finally allowed to be funny again

Personally I really look forward to the dress as a troll day, hope to bring you pictures of that

In the meantime, here's a new build with minor fixes all over the place. Our QA is too busy testing to even write a changelog, so finding the fixes will be our way of hunting easter eggs, I guess...

hotfix
By csant. Friday, 6. April 2007, 06:30:03
After updating to new X libs on some Linux distros, Opera stopped working. We are looking into the issue, and in the meantime we have a hotfix ready for you.

Happy Easter!

If you do not want to install a weekly release but continue running version 9.1, you can change the "DefaultDepth" option to 16 in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, as this will also work around the problem.

hotfix 2
By csant. Saturday, 7. April 2007, 07:30:15
It's Easter time - but we are busy…

Yesterday we issued a hotfix for a crash on startup caused by a recent update on several Linux distros of libX11, to patch CVE-2007-1667. A few users reported some sideeffects - we have a better fix for you now.

Thanks for all the quick feedback - enjoy the new build, and Happy Easter!

all good things…
By csant. Sunday, 8. April 2007, 09:39:05
…come by three, they say

The new UNIX build should now fix the crashers several people were still seeing after updating libX11 and running the last hotfix.

Hope this is it, for this busy Easter "vacation" - and thanks again for all the feedback!

A call for video on the web
Posted on April 17, 2007
by Håkon Wium Lie

It's time to make video a first-class citizen of the web. We, the users, have video cameras in our pockets and the bandwidth to tranfer more clips and streams than we can watch. What's missing is a an easy way to integrate video into web pages, and native support for video in browsers. We, the web community, should address this by adding a video element to HTML:
<video src="demo.ogg">

In addition to giving video an HTML element, we must also agree on a baseline video format that will be universally supported, just like the GIF, JPEG and PNG image format are universally supported. It's important that the video format we choose can be supported by a wide range of devices an that it's royalty-free (RF). RF is a well-establish principle for W3C standards.

The Ogg Theora format is a promising candidate which has been chosen by Wikipedia.

At Opera, we have built an experimental version that has native support for Ogg Theora. For now, it is only available on Windows. NOTE! Do not choose to start Opera in the installation process. After installing, exit the installation process and start the the experimental build manually.

Here are some pages using the video element:
opacity
simple
three
hiof
hiof

Current work
By olli. Friday, 20. April 2007, 07:48:27

Hi guys
We are currently working on Kestrel. There will be some cool new features, but also a lot of bug fixing. We won't have a weekly here for a little while, but when we have something to present you guys will be the first to know

Kestrel is coming along

Build number? Hummmm, I predict... Opera 9.5

These changes are just a preview of what you can expect from Kestrel. Current internal builds of Kestrel fix the text-shadow problems, implement even more CSS Selectors, and fix even more bugs. There are plenty more nice additions, too.

The Next Wave: Opera 9.5 (Kestrel) and Opera 10 (Peregrine)
Submitted by Alastor on 4 May, 2007 - 13:58.

Opera Software is quite busy, actually that busy that two versions are coming. And not just on one platform, no the intention is to link many platforms together, meaning the desktop release will simultaneously come with the release for devices and mobiles. Currently Opera 9.5, code named Kestrel, is planned for a golden final release this year, while the first preview of Opera 10, code named Peregrine, will appear at the end of this year.

So what is Kestrel? A falcon. And also a warming up present from Opera Software. But you shouldn't take that too negatively, Kestrel is an in-between release, while Peregrine is the next major release (Opera 10). Kestrel will introduce some of the rendering engine changes from Peregrine which don't have a too high impact yet on the entire release. Peregrine itself, also a falcon, will have major rendering engine changes (of course everything that's in Kestrel), improvements to the user interface, performance enhancements and stunning new features. What we can expect remains to be seen, but I'm betting on an entirely new skin, one that fits Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), as well as features that, just like Speed Dial, will make the news headlines.

In this article we mainly discuss the upcoming Kestrel release as news on Peregrine is still very limited due to it's early stage.

Rendering engine improvements
Support for CSS3, where especially selectors will get a major addition. One of the most noticable is text-shadow support (multiple shadows, maximum blur limitation) to have, well, text with shadows behind them. Amongst other fixes include correct (not IE compatible) support of document.getElementById(), which should return the id, not the name. Additionally changes are in the house for the rendering of tables and fixes for rounding problems (using ems).

Opera Mail improvements
Kestrel will include at least the first run of changes for Opera's mail client (aka M2), consisting of a new back-end, which should end any freezes when checking mail as well as fixes for corrupted search and indexes. Uncertain is yet if the second run of changes will make it, where a long awaited newsgroup feature is coming (what could it be?). Mail client operability is also important, and Kestrel will have full support (part of it is already in Opera 9.2) for exchanging mails between Apple Mail and Opera Mail. The problem was apparently caused by Apple Mail, which doesn't fully comply with the RFC standards for exchanging messages. One of the annoying Opera Mail bugs will also be fixed where attachements are renamed to .tmp files rather than their original names, due to content-type recognition problems.

User interface fixes
Although no major user interface work is planned for Kestrel there seems to be a little hope that there will be a couple of small, yet wanted, changes. One of the possible changes could be site specific support for the content blocker. The code is already there, but it keeping your hopes up it's stable enough to include in Kestrel. Additionally site specific preferences for opera:about will work correctly in Kestrel. For the Linux platform a fix is included where when the tab bar is disabled (with the window panel on), and tabs are minimized icons are displayed (a remnent from MDI).

And more...
Support for extra security through HttpOnly cookies will be included in Kestrel (as it will be in Firefox 3), which should prevent renegade scripts on a site setting the cookie from reading the cookie. Userjs for https should be working in Kestrel according to Mitchman.

Unconfirmed future features
Support for the <video> tag is already present in an experimental build on Opera Labs. Microsoft Silverlight support, which by the sounds of supporting competition could be included as a default plug-in, just like Flash? For Peregrine we might see HTML 5 support as well as offline web applications (beyond Widgets) following the WHATWG specifications.

As always, please remember this is a rather incomplete article on all the changes that we can expect for Kestrel (Opera 9.5), and especially Peregrine (Opera 10). With the passing of time, and when we get new builds from the Opera Desktop Team, we'll learn more and more of what Opera Software has up its sleaves. With Kestrel this year, and Peregrine probably next year there's a lot of work being done, and a lot coming for all of us to see of the famous Opera Software innovations for the web.

Upcoming SVG support in Opera and a Wii suprise

While it is probably well known within the SVG community (or not judging by the number of SVG sites that block Opera, and tell the user to download Firefox), there is maybe a lack of awareness in the web design community at large about just how many strides Opera has made in its SVG 1.1 support. As this test from Jeff Schiller states:

In roughly a year, the Opera browser went from being one of the least usable SVG implementations (no scripting/DOM support) to the best native implementation and achieved a higher score than the famed Adobe SVG Viewer

Opera has the best native SVG support of any browser on the market, and is only beat out by Batik 1.7 (great work guys) for the most compliant engine. Things don't stand still however, and I've already blogged previous about support for using <a="http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2007/02/01/using-svg-through-css-to-spice-up-your-d">SVG as a background image and list image in CSS
in internal builds of Opera Kestrel. This is not the only improvements however. Kestrel will also support:
Support for using SVG files in the image element
SVG Tiny 1.2 vector-effect [Spec]
SVG Tiny 1.2 navigation [Spec]
SVG Tiny 1.2 handler [Spec]
Speed improvements and optimisations
Many general bug fixes of our support of animations, text, SVG DOM methods and filters

Not only that, but Kestrel is still in active development, and there will be further support for SVG added before it goes final. But for much of this one doesn't have to wait until Kestrel goes into public beta. This is because The Internet Channel for Wii includes some of the modules from the Kestrel branch of our core rendering engine. This means that some of our improvements, both to CSS3 selectors and SVG 1.1 are already out there, sitting next to your TV, ready to be checked out. Bare in mind that the Wii is limited to two fonts, so visual results may vary. Go check it out and see what you think…

New to SVG, or want to check out some techniques? Go check out our tutorials on Dev.Opera.

Opera 9.21 build

Hi
I know you all are awaiting 9.50 to play with, but in the meanwhile we will have a update on Merlin.
We have kept the fix rate at a minimal here so the few fixes we have here are the high pri ones

Changelog
*Setting font style in the UI now works again
*Larger search field in speed dial, looked a bit chunky on smaller resolutions
*Added Yahoo Answers to built in search
*A number of crashes fixed and memory leaks plugged
*Proxy PAC files now read from system on Windows and Mac
*Windows media player 11 NP version now works without crashing. Get it here

Mac specific
*Added support for Smart Crash Reports


Download:
Windows MSI
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Unix

Yet another merlin build

I know ya'll are awaiting Kestrel builds, but we are not yet there. We do though have a few stability fixes in the pipeline for 9.22

Changelog
*A lot of improvements to Bittorrent. Downloading large files should now work a lot better.
*Bolding of fonts in toolbars and dialogs should now work
*The Silverlight plugin should now work

UNIX
*Turned off shared memory by default. Manually enable it by setting the variable OPERA_NUM_XSHM to a suitable value.

Download:
Windows MSI
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Unix

We've taken down the Classic installer due to the extra files it was installing.

More stability and speed

We're in a bittorrent bugfix mode right now, so this new build is both faster with high speed peers, and more stable.

Remember to break this "weekly"

Download:
Windows MSI
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Opera 9.22 Build 8801

Sorry no log

ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/922/

Fun with the fuzzer

Yesterday Mozilla released their jsfunfuzz tool at the Blackhat convention in Las Vegas. The tool is very useful for stress-testing the javascript engine and its stability. While running the tool, we found four crashers - one of which might have some security implications.

Here is a build that should address all of the issues: test it, give it a spin with the tool - and please report any crashers you might find with the fuzzer, and most importantly: send us a crashlog along with it!

Have fuzz fun! And many thanks to Mozilla for sharing their tool.

Download:
Windows MSI
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Unix

Hooray, the Magician's still not dead...